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Civil rights icon remembered for voting drives in South

Days before this year's presidential election, an ailing Lawrence Guyot was ushered to the front of an early-voting line in Maryland, where he cast his ballot for Barack Obama. He died nearly three weeks later.

Civil rights icon remembered for voting drives in South

Three memorial services in Mississippi and Washington will mark Lawrence Guyot's life as a voting rights activist in the 1960s.

Lawrence Guyot, a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee member in Mississippi during the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, recalls his work in a 2010 photo taken in Hattiesburg, Miss.(Photo: Rogelio V. Solis, AP)

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Guyot and Fannie Lou Hamer organized the Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party in 1964

Guyot considered his vote for Obama, the nation's first black president, a last act of defiance against those who have fought to suppress black participation in the electoral process.

"They lost that battle,'' he said from his hospital room last month.

Guyot, 73, was remembered Saturday at a memorial service in his hometown of Pass Christian and will be remembered in another service Monday at Tougaloo College. He also will be honored Dec. 15 in Washington, where he continued his work as an activist.

"Guyot got to see the blessings of his life,'' said Frank Smith, a close friend who worked with Guyot in Mississippi in the 1960s. "God enabled him to live through a revolution in race relations in America and in Mississippi.''

Congress passed the 1965 Voting Rights Act largely because of battles fought by Guyot and other civil rights workers.

"He was not a bystander in all of this,'' Smith said. "He was a main performer.''

As a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Guyot traveled across Mississippi to register blacks to vote.

The Delta, where Guyot worked most, "was the heart of the worst of Mississippi," recalled Eleanor Holmes Norton, a Democratic congressional delegate representing Washington, D.C. "That is the very definition of courage."

Norton, who worked with Guyot in Mississippi and will preside over his memorial service in Washington, called him a "true unsung hero.''

Guyot helped lead Freedom Summer, which enlisted volunteers from around the country to register blacks to vote in Mississippi in 1964.

That same year, the Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party organized by Guyot and fellow activist Fannie Lou Hamer challenged the state's all-white Democratic delegation at the party's national convention in Atlantic City, N.J.

The effort didn't force changes at that convention, but it led the national Democratic Party to later require that convention delegations include blacks and more women. Some say it paved the way for Obama's election.

Guyout said the strategy was get the nation to understand the plight of blacks in his state.

"We couldn't take Mississippi into America, but by God we certainly could bring America into Mississippi, and get them to understand that this was their responsibility as much as anybody else's,'' he said in a September interview with the Gannett Washington Bureau.

Guyot was particularly proud of the passage of the Voting Rights Act. Among other provisions, the law requires states with a history of discrimination, including Mississippi, to get "pre-clearance'' from the Justice Department or a federal court before making election changes.

"What the Voting Rights Act did was stop the South from ignoring the 15th Amendment,'' said Guyot, who filed one of the first pre-clearance lawsuits under Section 5 of the act. "It said we're not going to allow you to trample on the right to vote.''

Armand Derfner, who argued Guyot's lawsuit before the Supreme Court, called Guyot a "political visionary.''

The suit argued that some states were trying to apply the Voting Rights Act's pre-clearance requirement to registration-related changes only. Without a ruling on the suit, Derfner said, the act's impact would have been reduced to "half a loaf.''

"Guyot was just bound and determined that we had to have a case like that,'' he said.

The voter ID laws and other election changes that Mississippi and some other states passed ahead of the 2012 election angered Guyot, who called them an "absolute assault on the right to vote.''

"We're clearly fighting the fight again, but the fight is worth fighting,'' he said earlier this year.

Dorie Ladner, a native of Hattiesburg, Miss., who worked with Guyot in the civil rights movement, recalled that she, Guyot and other civil rights workers would dress like sharecroppers and go into the cotton fields to urge blacks to register to vote.

Despite the danger, she said, blacks would listen to Guyot.

"That was part of his calling,'' she said.

Guyot said the activists never pushed the black workers to register.

"We said, 'We're going. Come go with us,'" he said. "We never lied to them and said we could protect you from violence because we couldn't. But what we did do was say if you want your children to have a better life than you, come with us. That's what brought them.''

Guyot was arrested many times for his civil rights work, but veterans say it was a severe beating that he and others suffered at a jail in Winona, Miss., that ultimately got the nation's attention.

"Guyot knew what it meant to be a black man who defied the racist culture of Mississippi,'' said Norton, the congressional delegate. "He knew full well what he was doing. And he paid a price for it.''

Despite the beating, Guyot said he and his fellow activists refused to quit.

"We were all beaten to the extent that if any us were going to turn around, that should have been enough to turn us around. None of us did,'' he said. "We firmly believed that what we were doing was right."